Cool New Marketing Technologies: Caught and Served

Archive for the ‘Social Media Marketing’ Category

Will having a virtual event hurt my face to face event attendance?

By Steve Gogolak

Do Not Enter

I’ll be perfectly honest with you, there is very little data available about online events hurting or helping face to face attendance.  I get asked this question all the time and, based on the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen, it seems like virtual events either have either no impact or a positive impact on face to face attendance.  Here are a few things to consider:

  1. If your company’s travel budget has been restricted and you can no longer travel to the annual *whatever* event, you simply can’t go.  Period.   This is still a reality, even as we pull out of the recession.
  2. To the participants, virtual events still don’t demonstrate an equivalent value to a face to face event.  They come darn close if you really invest yourself, but if you’re authorized to travel, chances are you’re going to rather than sit in front of the computer.

To sum up those two points: if you can go, you will; if you can’t go, you hope there is an online alternative.

Looking for further evidence, I decided to ask both my Twitter and LinkedIn network what they all thought.  Silence on twitter, as expected of a complex question.  LinkedIn had some insight to share, however.  Here are a few highlights:

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Posted in Social Media Marketing, Virtual Events | 9 Comments »

Are blog comments really effective?

By Steve Gogolak

I finished reading Inbound Marketing, an incredible book by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah over at Hubspot, a few weeks ago and it, along with The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott, advocates for new bloggers to begin reading relevant industry blogs and comment on posts to begin to engage in the conversation.  I couldn’t agree more – that’s what I did a while back when I began writing for aWiderNet.  Only problem is that I feel like the value of the comments on every blog I read are diminishing because there are now tons of people posting for exposure.  Google corrected the link love issue by recognizing links posted as a comment on blogs and removing all authority they might generate to the resulting clickthrough page, but people still seem to try.  Why is that?

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Posted in Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing, User Experience | 2 Comments »

Tobi.com Launches Fashionista Augmented Reality Dressing Room

By Greg Jones

After USPS launched its Priority Mail Simulator, it was only a matter of time before fashion retailers picked up the idea and applied it to online clothes shopping. Tobi.com has recently launched Fashionista, an Augmented Reality tool that facilitates the online purchasing process by allowing shoppers to try on clothes from the comfort (and privacy) of their own home.

fashionista

Once you get yourself aligned with your virtual clothing on your webcam, you can thumbs up an item to send it to your shopping cart, or give it a thumbs down to try on something else. The ability to snap pictures of virtual outfits and share with friends over Facebook means critical fashion-related-peer-feedback is still maintained in the purchasing process. The only questions left to ask are how well the images of clothes actually fit people shopping for them and if your saved preferences/sizes are close enough to warrant an online purchase without an actual fitting.

Who is next to apply Augmented Reality in a useful fashion? (Pun intended.)

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Posted in Digital Marketing, Marketing Technology, Social Media Marketing | No Comments »